business agility

Agile Transformation and Maturity Roadmap

Agile Maturity Roadmap

In today’s IT arena, most organizations are at some stage of an agile transformation. Mature teams are using agile methods as their primary software development lifecycle and have most likely mastered the art of building things right and in short iterations. However, we’ve found that many of these teams still need help building the right thing. Many agile teams are jeopardizing their success by working quickly and not understanding how to incorporate the appropriate amount of analysis to ensure they’re building the right, value driven solution.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, other teams are just dipping their toes in the agile pool. For many, the idea of turning a long-term, waterfall project approach into two week sprints is overwhelming. These teams need help determining how they will successfully approach analysis differently – not only in getting over the sprint hurdle, but also the idea of taking team members from a more traditional, role delineated environment to a team based environment.

Agile Transformation Roadmap

While this is our standard recommendation, we understand that all agile teams are at a different point in their transformation and created this roadmap for maximum flexibility. Tailor this solution to your specific team needs.

0. Assess Current State

Have you started your agile journey but found that there isn’t a clear beginning, middle or way to measure progress or maturity of your agile transformation?

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Begins with an online assessment and follows up with a feedback consultation with one of our experts. The assessment will provide information related to your AS IS state and allow us to tailor a roadmap for your environment.

1. Level-Set Management & Product Owners

Do you have product owners and managers who need to understand a whole new vocabulary, including features, stories, measuring business value, prioritization and MVP (minimum viable product)? Are they overwhelmed or have different interpretations?

Get everyone on the same page with agile and the various approaches such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe. Gain an understanding of not just why these are common practices but how they are relevant to the Agile Manifesto and values. Identify lean, informal just-in-time requirements which help maximize teams’ output and realize the importance of value management and MVP.

3. Experience Agile Success

Has your team gone to classes, read books and seen the videos but aren’t able to apply what they’ve learned on their projects and teams? Are they doing all the ceremonies but not getting the benefits they expected from agile?

4. Assess Team Skill Gaps

One of the outcomes from the workshops in this boot camp is a team activity that assesses each member’s skill level across various domains. The skills assessment inventory highlights gaps and identifies potential development needs.

5. Take Agile to the Next Level

Is your team proficient at using the user story template but still not building and prioritizing output that has business value or just not ‘acceptable’ based on the necessary requirements?

Use your real-world projects to take user stories beyond being a placeholder. Identify how to refine, groom, slice and how to ensure your stories satisfy the INVEST characteristics in order to confirm they are ready.

6. Adopt Scaled Agile

Have you taken Agile classes and now having trouble making the process work for your organization?

Address the question, “How much SAFe does your organization need?” Level-set your multi-team framework and identify areas where implementing the framework may be too heavy.

7. Assess Team Progress

Are your teams doing self-assessments or retrospectives, but the results are not showing improvement?

IndigoCube Solution: Conduct an independent retrospective assessment

Many teams fall into the trap of conducting a retrospect and either abandoning agile practices without knowing the impact or adopting agile practices without any real benefit. Therefore, the process improvement is random and not effective. Let our team conduct an independent retrospective assessment and develop a continuous improvement backlog.

8. Validate Metrics

Is your leadership looking for metrics that validate and measure your agile practices? Have your teams been successfully doing agile for a while, but showing some signs of fatigue or burnout? Are your teams not sure how to optimize their agile approach or not completely satisfied with their current state of being?

Set up an on-going plan to cross functionally train and empower the team members and scrum masters how to define the right metrics based on key agile success factors and values.

Regardless of where your team falls, agile needs to be done in a manner that can be sustainable while upholding the spirit of the manifesto and maintaining a healthy, lean cross-functional team environment. Begin your journey to agile maturity using our agile transformation and optimization solution!